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Thread: #MeToo Comes For Martin Luther King

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    #MeToo Comes For Martin Luther King

    Warning: This might trigger you if you hold MLK in high esteme. It should be noted it's based on preliminary information about research into his life yet to be published.

    #MeToo Comes For Martin Luther King

    Historians have known for many years that civil rights icon Martin Luther King had been unfaithful to his wife. But now, David Garrow, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for his biography of King, has unearthed previously classified FBI documents showing that King was genuinely sexually depraved. From the Times of London (behind subscriber paywall):

    A huge archive of documents recently released from Federal Bureau of Investigation files exposes in detail King’s sexual activities with dozens of women as he travelled the country campaigning against racial inequality.

    In one memo written after the FBI bugged King’s room at a Washington hotel, there is a startling foreshadowing of the videotape that came to haunt Donald Trump at the lowest moment of his presidential campaign in 2016....

    William Sullivan, assistant director of the FBI, wrote in the 1964 memo that King joked to his friends “he had started the ‘International Association for the Advancement of $#@!-Eaters’.”

    In another incident said to have been recorded by FBI agents, King is alleged to have “looked on, laughed and offered advice” while a friend who was also a Baptist minister raped a woman described as one of his “parishioners”.

    Details of the assault are believed to have been captured on tapes that are currently being held in a vault under court seal at the US National Archives.

    <skip a lot of details...>


    Garrow’s report will be published on Thursday in the UK magazine Standpoint. Its acting editor, Michael Mosbacher, released on Twitter the editorial explaining why they chose to publish Garrow, who had been refused by The Guardian and others. Mosbacher says that the Guardian paid Garrow — who is, by the way, a man of the left, in fact a member of Democratic Socialists of America — for his work, but then declined to run it. The Atlantic and the Washington Post also refused to run it, the editorial alleges, as did unnamed conservative US magazines. Mosbacher writes:

    When the sexual mores of cardinals, presidents, writers, film directors and producers have all been exposed, why is it that questioning the behaviour of a civil rights icon is still beyond the pale? Is not the whole point of the #MeToo movement that no one, regardless of their stature or position, should be above examination of their personal behaviour? Dr. King is the closest the US has to a saint in this secular age, a figure of universal — at least publicly-professed — reverence. Is that not all the more reason for subjecting him to scrutiny, however great his contribution to the creation of a more tolerant society?

    He’s right. I wish none of this were true, and perhaps we will learn when the recordings are eventually released that these claims are not true, but I very much doubt it. David Garrow’s reputation as a civil rights movement historian is beyond reproach, and as a Democratic Socialist, Garrow cannot be said to have political motives for trying to discredit King. Given his professional background and political convictions, one imagines that it must have been excruciating for Garrow to have written this. But Garrow is a historian, not a hagiographer. Besides, it’s better to face the painful truth and to deal with it than to remain sheltered by a canopy of lovely lies....
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

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